Posts Tagged ‘Apps’

Digital experiences are emulating real life more and more every day. This may seem counterintuitive, considering the hate that rains down on skeuomorphic visual design, but there's a lot more to emulating real life than aesthetics.

Interface designers can emulate real-life physics and movement on a digital screen. This type of motion is becoming more common, which is why it's becoming easier for people to understand computers. We're not getting better, the interfaces are!

Mobile application ecosystems — let’s count Android and iOS here — are unbelievably dynamic, but they also suffer from both software and hardware fragmentation. This is especially true for Android, but fragmentation also exists in the iOS ecosystem, as experienced with the rollout of iOS 8. As the latest version of iOS was released, many existing apps were made clumsy on updated devices.

Even the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have had not-so-typical issues for Apple devices. In addition, a significant proportion of users with older devices have very few options: essentially, buy new hardware (i.e. a new device) to get everything working well.

What if you could create an entire back end for your mobile applications that was feature-complete in data synchronization, push-notification support, user management and file-handling before you even started building the mobile experience? What if it was architected in such a way that you could easily create new cross-platform native and web applications seamlessly on this back end?

While this might sound like a fairy tale, it is exactly what providers of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) are aiming to give app developers. It is up to you to determine whether that is true for the experiences you are creating.

In the wonderful world of millions of mobile apps, many users suffer from ADD (app deluge disorder), and no aphorism looms larger for developers than “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” Once a large group of people are downloading your app, you’ve already won half the battle and have accomplished your primary goal. Now, keeping them engaged post-download is your next one. This is where onboarding takes center stage.

Being involved in a mobile analytics firm, I see firsthand what challenges app publishers experience. In this article, I will go over the importance of using visual mobile analytics to measure the user experience from day one, as well as provide examples and other insights, so that you can optimize your onboarding experience and increase your app’s retention rate.

According to a recent report, HTML is the most widely used language for mobile app developers. The main reasons among developers for selecting web technologies is cross-platform portability of code and the low cost of development. We’ve also heard that hybrid apps tend to be sluggish and poorly designed. Let’s prove whether it’s possible to deliver the native look and feel that we’re used to.

This article provides many hints, code snippets and lessons learned on how to build great hybrid mobile apps. I’ll briefly introduce hybrid mobile app development, including its benefits and drawbacks. Then, I’ll share lessons I’ve learned from over two years of developing Hojoki and CatchApp, both of which run natively on major mobile platforms and were built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Finally, we’ll review the most prominent tools to wrap code in a native app.

In today’s fast-paced mobile market, consumers have no patience for mobile apps that compromise their experience. “Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps (including games). Those comments and ratings make hundreds of millions of potential downloaders skip those lousy apps. Sounds harsh, but that’s the way it is.

An app succeeds not by chance. It is the result of the right decisions made at the right time. The most successful mobile app developers understand the importance of performance, quality and robustness across the array of mobile devices that their customers use.

Look at your calendar. If you’re anything like me, all you see are meetings, places to go, things to do, people to meet and not a lot of white space. Few people love their calendar. So, we set out to change that, and we learned a lot in the process.

Our app is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. The app itself has been around since 2011, but the story of how it came to be and what our team ultimately learned is one that I have been wanting to tell for quite some time. It’s the story of how limitations led to my biggest success in the App Store — and my biggest failure.

SmashingConf isn't the eighth wonder of the world, but we are pretty close. Join us at SmashingConf Oxford on March 16–19 or meet us at the shores of Santa Monica for SmashingConf LA on April 27–30. You won't be disappointed.